With two billion people now online, we should probably start thinking about the kind of world we want to create. Enter the Society 5 project.

"This is a collaborative discussion. We believe the future of our society should be discussed and decided upon democratically," write the project's founders.

Society 5 plans to explore the past, present and potential futures of our society, initially as a blog at society5.net, and then as a book and beyond.

The founders are two Australians. Pia Waugh is well known for her advocacy of open-source software and government 2.0 issues, and, until very recently, worked as an advisor to Labor Senator Kate Lundy. Will Grant is a political sociologist and science communicator based at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

On this week's Patch Monday podcast, Grant explains that any future society we build must be based on the society we have today, in a politically achievable way — just as computer operating systems are rarely built from scratch; the basic layers of family and community — or the basic layers of program code — are retained, and extra layers of abstraction are built on top.

As the new online society evolves, players with competing interests will come into conflict — as we saw last week in Optus' Federal Court win over the National Rugby League (NRL) and the Australian Football League (AFL).

Grant also explains how the replacement of mass media with social media and now personalised search could lead to "filter bubbles", where we only hear about viewpoints that are already similar to our own.

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Stilgherrian is a freelance journalist, commentator and podcaster interested in big-picture internet issues, especially security, cybercrime and hoovering up bulldust. He studied computing science and linguistics before a wide-ranging media career and a stint at running an IT business. He can write iptables firewall rules, set a rabbit tr...
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